English dubs. Experimentation and consolidation

English dubbing has been booming and blossoming on streaming platforms since late 2016. Soon thereafter, Chaume (2018: 87) remarked upon the emerging trend on Netflix to dub non-English-language content into English, which has been observed as a marketing strategy to attract viewership of ‘foreign’ content and termed ‘the dubbing revolution’ (Moore 2018 in Ranzato and Zanotti 2019: 3). ‘Revolution’ is a notably apt term used to describe English dubbing, given its disruptive as well as cyclical meaning. That is to say that the novelty of dubbing as a mode of localisation for the into-English directionality is in fact illusory. What is actually in question is the resurgence and revamping of a practice. Whereas subtitling has long been the norm for localising live-action fiction into English, dubbing was in the limelight at the dawn of the talkies in the 1930s through to the 1970s, over the course of which time it was often used for European cinema, Kung Fu films, and Spaghetti Westerns (Hayes 2021). Dubbing did not disappear with the rise of subtitling, however. Rather, it became and remains to be the preferred mode of localisation for specialised products, most of which were animated: cartoons and video games (and live- action ads are sometimes dubbed too). Despite these past and present realities, Anglophone viewers tend to be less familiar with the dubbing mode or, at least, are unaware of their exposure to it, as dubbing is camouflaged in animation and live-action dubs are generally far removed in time and not revisited. Many viewers are therefore watching English dubs on streaming platforms, aka subscription video-on-demand services (SVoDs), for the very first time. This pseudo novelty has created a space for experimentation and different dubbing strategies are emerging, which can be broadly separated in four: standardisation, domestication, foreignisation, and a hybrid of two or all three (Hayes and Bolaños-García- Escribano 2022). In this presentation, I will discuss the English dubbing of 82 Castilian- Spanish films and series on Netflix, and contextualise them among the English dubs of other languages on Netflix as well as the English dubs of other Spanish titles on other SVoDs such as Amazon Prime Video and HBO. Furthermore, I will draw on Translation Studies theory in order to explain why different dubbing strategies are being accepted by native Anglophones.